If you don’t measure it, you can’t optimize it. Coda Hale of Yammer talks about service-level performance metrics, how they use them to guide their development strategy, and how you can improve the transparency of your own software.

Backbone.js is a lightweight MVC framework for organizing JS code and simplifying common AJAX and event-driven DOM update use cases. Pivot Jay Phillips shows how to get started with Backbone.js and demonstrates how he uses it on projects.

Veteran Pivot David Stevenson gives his thoughts on the when, why, and how of performance optimization in Rails. He touches on a few of the approaches that make sense and the best tools for each approach.

We see the power of cheap cloud hosting, OSS, and incubators to make building a web app cheap, and now the same is happening to hardware. The means of production is becoming democratized and agile hardware startups are popping up to solve problems IRL.

For most applications autoscale is not fire-and-forget, but it shouldn’t require a fancy PaaS, either. Jesse Proudman of Blue Box shows how to combine the New Relic API with the Fog gem to build your own autoscale system using any cloud infrastructure.

Joe Ruscio, CTO of Librato, demonstrates Silverline, an app-centric monitoring and workload management service. He shows how Silverline improves capacity planning, continuous deployment, RCA, alerting, and provides predictable degradation under load.

Bryan Helmkamp talks about practical service-oriented design.

Rapleaf is an aggregation service for personalization data. Manish Shah describes how they help companies gain insight into customers, engage them more meaningfully, and deliver timely messages. They also help consumers understand their online footprint.

John Woodell, a JRuby developer from Google, describes the 1.4.0 release of Google’s AppEngine, which includes JRuby support. John focuses on the how AppEngine differs from other managed cloud hosting environments for Ruby web apps.

Kevin Kelly, Founding Executive Editor of Wired Magazine and noted technologist, presents ideas from latest book, What Technology Wants. “[T]echnology as a whole is…a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies.”